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Oceans Unbounded: Transversing Asia across "Area Studies"
Barbara Watson Andaya
Recent endorsements of maritime history as an integral part of world history should be central in any attempt to transverse the academic divides separating the study of "South", "East" and "Southeast" Asia (AHA Forum. 2006; Buschmann 2005). Nonetheless, envisaging an interconnected maritime Asia that is not subservient to the boundaries of area studies and modern nations, and yet does not descent to the simplistic and overly general, is a formidable challenge. A number of studies have tracked trading diasporas and economic linkages, but the place of the oceans in the cultures of Asia's littoral societies has received much less attention. It may not be difficult to locate the reasons. Although in simple terms, "maritime history" is the history of human interaction with the sea in all its facets (Finamore 2004, p. 1), most Asianists have reached adulthood located within a nation-state with identifiable territorial borders and carry inherent intellectual biases that privilege a land-based perspective.
In modern times, when long-distance ocean travel is normally envisaged in terms of a holiday cruise, it is difficult to imagine daily existence among the communities of boat dwellers who once occupied an important economic niche in Asia's maritime environment. Today the groups Malays called orang laut or sea people are marginalized in the nation-states that claim jurisdiction over them, yet in the past they were essential as suppliers of the marine products so critical to Asian trade, especially between Southeast Asia and China (Andaya 1975, pp. 29-52, 256; Chou 2003; Ivanoff 1997; Sather 1997; Sopher 1965; Zacot 2002) Individuals whose experience had been shaped by the land were amazed at the degree to which water was the natural environment of these peoples; as a twelfth-century Chinese account puts it, "they can dive in water without closing their eyes" (Hirth and Rockhill 1911, p. 32). Orang laut knowledge of local conditions was especially critical in places where navigation was difficult, and in the Straits of Melaka and other offshore areas they traditionally helped to guard the sea lanes, often compelling passing ships to stop and trade in certain ports. The respect once accorded them (evident, for instance, in the titles bestowed by Malay kings) shows that what one scholar of modern China sees as a typically inferior status for boat people has not always applied. In coastal China and Vietnam their relegation to the lower ranks of the social system may be very old, but one could argue that it can ultimately be traced to the advent of land-based kingdoms with their land-based orientation (Andaya 1975, p. 322; Anderson 1972, p. 7; Ptak 2001, p. 398).
Orang Laut houseboat, Riau Archipelago 1991. Courtesy of Cynthia Chou
Orang Laut woman preparing food, Riau Archipelago 1991. Courtesy of Cynthia Chou
Though now rarely attempted, the possibility of cross-cultural comparisons among such sea-oriented cultures opens up interesting potentials for research. For instance, the concept of compass coordinates is not necessarily congruent with the indigenous knowledge of non-Western societies; the spatial orientation of peoples who spend most of their time at sea has therefore been a topic of considerable interest for specialists in Indonesia and the Pacific. It might be illuminating to ask whether directions such as north and south are related to "up" and "down" among sea-going communities in other areas of coastal Asia as they are in the huge Austronesian linguistic family that covers most of the Pacific and island Southeast Asia. (Blust 1997, pp. 38, 48; Adelaar 1997, pp. 53-81; Sather 1997, p. 93). Let me provide a visual example from the Galela people of Halmahera, in eastern Indonesia. The map shown here, drawn by a Japanese scholar, represents Halamahera and the surrounding area upside down because according to the Galela orientation system, which is related to the monsoon winds and a land-sea axis, "up" lies in a southerly direction, and "down" is to the north (Yoshida 1980, pp. 36-37).
Galela perspective on the world (Yoshida 1980: 36)
The inherited vigilance of societies whose existence is closely calibrated with the rhythms of the sea, and who maintain an ability to read nature's portents, was dramatically demonstrated nearly two years ago, when a terrible tsunami devastated so much of the area around the Indian Ocean. It was reported that isolated groups on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal recognized warning signs like changes in bird cries and the behavior of land and marine animals. They therefore moved to higher ground well in advance of the destructive walls of water that penetrated so far inland. Nonetheless, although many communities are still living with the tragic results of December 2004, the Asian seas are known less for their ferocity than for their long function as a medium for connecting quite distant regions through the exchange of people, goods, and ideas. It is the human dimension that makes this interlocking relationship between land and ocean such a compelling teaching device. If we insist that the sea and those who live with the sea deserve a more prominent place in our study of Asia, we will take an important step in developing the framework required for any comparative overview. In turn, this framework will go a long way towards overcoming the confines of so-called area-studies while redressing the scholarly preoccupation with land-based societies that has so informed the presentation of Asian cultures.
Relief from Borobudur, central Java. Courtesy of John Miksic
A shift in orientation is not necessarily an easy task, for the polities and governments whose narratives dominate historiography have rarely seen the oceans as an integral part of their territorial domain. More frequently, the sea is regarded as a boundary, separating land inhabitants from other land inhabitants. As John of Gaunt proclaimed in Shakespeare's Richard II, the "silver sea" served England, "in the office of a wall/ Or as a moat defensive to a house/Against the envy of less happier lands" (Shakespeare 2003, pp. 96-97). In India, despite a long tradition of maritime trade, Hindu insistence on the need to maintain ritual purity judged sea travel polluting for those of high caste, and by the twentieth century self-imposed restrictions were even being accepted by some Sudra groups (Bindra 2002, p. 36). Ming prohibitions forbidding coastal dwellers to cross the seas except as a member of an official mission were clearly ineffectual. Nevertheless, a perception of the ocean as marking off an imagined set of land dwellers from the "other" are apparent in a sixteenth-century Chinese map, in which the cartographer inserted a stylized sea separating China from the area we now know as mainland Southeast Asia (Teng 2004, p. 37; Wade 2004, p. 6).
Even as representatives of land-based kingdoms took to the sea with the goal of reaching places only dimly imagined, the sheer immensity of the earth's oceans was daunting; after all, they cover 70.8 percent of the earth's surface. In these ventures the trepidation aroused in contemplating the unknown could be allayed through explanation and classification that made the unfamiliar imaginable. In the tenth century, for instance, the geographer Al-Muqaddasi affirmed that "the realm of Islam" was encircled by just one ocean "and that this is known to everyone who sails," but he also acknowledged that Muslim treatises often spoke of three, five, or eight seas (Chaudhuri 1985, p. 4; Collins 1974, pp.148-64; see also Lewis 1999). On the other side of the world China's scholars also became caught up in efforts to categorize the known "oceans" and "seas". Within a larger "Western" and "Eastern" Ocean, Chinese cartographers identified smaller sectors on the maritime routes to Africa, a technique that allowed large expanses of water to be visualized simply as highways linking one land area to another. A map produced following Zheng He's expeditions thus depicts the Indian Ocean as a schematized corridor between India to the north and Arabia to the south (Needham 1954, 3, p. 560; Ptak 2001). A similar privileging of the land appears among early Portuguese and Dutch cartographers, who scattered the names of rivers, mountains, and towns across their maps of Asia, but presented the sea as a fanciful domain of belligerent whales, pitching ships and seductive mermaids (SuaÌrez, 1999, pp. 166-67).
Ultimately, however, it was European cartography that identified and named the world's oceans as we know them today– the Atlantic, the Arctic, the Indian, the Pacific and, in 2000, the Southern Ocean – with boundaries created when necessary; in the Southern Hemisphere, for instance, the Atlantic is separated from the Pacific by an artificial line drawn from Cape Horn to Antarctica. Even so, the human capacity for categorization is indefatigable, and within these five oceans the International Hydrographic Bureau currently identifies as many as fifty-four different seas.
To a considerable degree this desire for categorization, like national borders on the land, has created boundaries and subsets for academic inquiry. Several universities maintain Centers of Pacific Studies; we have a center for Arctic Studies in Washington, D.C. and various Centers of Atlantic Studies are located in European and U.S. institutions. We are all familiar with Braudel's notion of the special character of the Mediterranean, "a sea . . . so alive, so eternally young" (Braudel 2001), and his work has inspired many disciples. Barry Cunliffe has spoken of an "Atlantic mystique" linking coastal peoples like the Celts, Bretons, and Galicians, who had more in common with one another than they did with their inland kin. (Cunliffe 2001)[1]
In Asian Studies the fine detail this focused research can produce is most evident in regard to the Indian Ocean, the world's third largest. A subfield in its own right, "Indian Ocean Studies" can now support dedicated journals, conferences, and summer institutes. Further refinements are possible even within what would seem a very specific domain, and we thus find specialists on the "Eastern" and "Western" Indian Oceans. As Asianists, we are more familiar with the "eastern" orientation, although our view might change somewhat if we were interested, for instance, in the extensive networks of Arab trade that connected Africa to India and beyond.[2] Indeed, in his latest book, A Hundred Horizons, Sugata Bose joins others (2006; Pearson 2003) in arguing for the organic unity of the Indian Ocean by tracing the economic and cultural communication that made it an integrated and interregional arena well into the twentieth century.
As the geographer Martin Lewis has noted, these divisions of "sea space" do allow for effective communication among people with like interests. There is, however, a danger that our imaginations can be directed "along certain preset pathways . . . that reflect specific cultural and political outlooks" (Lewis 1999, p. 211). In light of this comment, it is interesting to note that Southeast Asia – located between two of the world's great oceans – remains a shadowy presence even when the theme of "maritime Asia" is employed. Nearly thirty years ago Donald Emmerson made a strong case for a "maritime perspective" on Southeast Asia (Emmerson 1980), and if we agree that greater attention should be given to the role of the sea in Asian communities, then Southeast Asia is a good place to begin. In the Malay-Indonesian and Philippine archipelagoes, for instance, between 95 and 100 percent of the population lives within 100 km of the coast and these cultures still posses the world's "richest residue" of ancient maritime technology (Lewis 1978, p. 63). Historical discussions of mainland Southeast Asia typically emphasize the cultural and economic base in agriculture, but it is worth remembering that 40 percent of Thailand's population, and over 80 percent of people in Vietnam, live in areas designated as coastal.[3] As one geographer has put it, "the degree of marine influence over the environment, settlement, communication and development of resources, both in Mainland and Island Southeast Asia, is probably unmatched in any other part of the world." (Barrow 1990, p. 78)
In this context, the uniqueness of Southeast Asia can also be attributed to its location at the crossroads of Asia's seaborne trade. The maritime connections between China and India through Southeast Asia are well documented (Hall 2006), but it is also useful to remember that winds and ocean currents linked southern Japan and the Ryukyu Islands to Taiwan and the Philippines, and that there are a range of linguistic and cultural similarities that go well beyond coincidence (Kumar and Rose 2000; Toichi, 1974; Waterson 1990, pp.15-17). Although the policy of sakoku under the Tokugawa shogunate institutionalized the idea of the sea as a barrier, the Japanese effort to present itself as a maritime power after 1941 can be seen as an attempt to revive earlier traditions. Included in a royal Ryukyu anthology of 1531, the chant of a priestess who summons the spirits of Japan, China, Java and "the southern seas" is compelling evidence of this older vision (Hokama 1998, p. 256).[4]
As innumerable studies have shown, one of the most effective means of tracking such connections in early times is through a consideration of trade. It is not enough, however, just to talk about port cities and maritime routes, and to treat the oceans as simply a "transport surface," a medium by which products and trade goods moved from one place to another. If we accept that explorations of resemblance and divergence may themselves be illuminating, we need to imagine the human reality that initiated and sustained commercial exchanges along ocean pathways. In viewing the seas as a space for creative human activity (Lowe 2003, pp. 121-122; Steinberg 2001, p. 46), we can only wonder at the human ingenuity that developed the sailing technology required to link far-flung areas, and that located and provided much-desired products for distant and unknown consumers. Is it not amazing, for example, that early communities in tropical Asia discovered how to roll the fibers of the sugar palm (Arenga pinnata) together sufficiently tightly even to lash a boat together? Or that resin from the Rhus vernicifera (Japanese lacquer) tree mixed with sawdust, shredded bamboo, or water-buffalo dung could be used for caulking (Burningham 1994, p. 223, Manguin 1985, p. 336)? Equally remarkable is the distance traversed by certain items that may have little significance in today's commercial world. Human cooperation over thousands of miles thus meant that beads made in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, China or Java could become prized heirloom possessions of buyers as far afield as Timor and Palau (Francis 2002).
Bamboo basket boats, Vietnam, 2000. Traditionally caulked with resin and fillers such as sawdust, shredded bamboo or cattle dung. Courtesy University of Hawai'i Center for Southeast Asian Studies picture archive
Let us take as another example the case of cowry shells. Although the species of cowries used for money (Cypraea moneta) was widely distributed through the Indo-Pacific area, the best come from the Maldives, and it was the commercial production here (breeding shells on palm fronds and other leaf matter lying in shallow water) that supplied Cypraea moneta for most of the world's trade until the eighteenth century. The tentacles of these operations were far-reaching; in Yunnan a cowry-based system of exchange for paying taxes, buying land, and making donations was well established by the ninth century CE and continued until the seventeenth century (Yang 2004). Another area where cowries were much used was northern Thailand, with local rulings that were often very precise: for example, one law code specifies that if an officer "grasps the breasts of a woman who is willing" he should be fined 22,000 cowrie shells, but (to our mind, paradoxically) only half the amount if he puts his hands inside her blouse (Wichienkeeo and Wijeyewardene 1986, pp. 22, 29). It seems that these networks linking Bengal and coastal Southeast Asia only declined with the expansion of Han control into Yunnan and an expanding globalized market based on coinage.
Cowry trade (Yang 2004. Used with permission)
A third trade item that might pique student interest is the edible holothuria, the sea slug or teripang. Again, tracking the distances covered by what early Europeans called a "repulsive" product requires us to think far beyond area-studies boundaries, and serves, if we need it, as another reminder of the great lengths to which human beings will go to satisfy the demands of commerce. Although teripang occur throughout the world's oceans – there are in fact about 1200 known species – the greatest diversity and the largest numbers were found among the islands of Southeast Asia and adjacent areas. The primary consumers in the early modern world were in China, where by the late Ming period sea slugs were standard in most banquets. The increasing demand fueled an expansion of the teripang trade, particularly in eastern Indonesia, where remote islands became drawn into a global exchange. As the market grew, even northern Australia became a major area for teripang collection, primarily by Bugis and Makassar traders from Sulawesi. Evidence of stone fireplaces, tamarind trees, and Muslim graves supply material evidence of their presence, as does Aboriginal art, linguistic borrowings, and legend (Macknight 1976). The gathering of sea cucumbers, still an important trade today, provides an intriguing example of a complex train of relationships that, as in the case of beads or cowries, encourages us to think of the manifold ways in which the sea has facilitated human interaction.
Makassar fishermen smoking teripang for the China trade, 1845. Port Essington, North Australia, (Macknight 1976, plate 11. Used with permission)
Comparisons of the cultural environments that are enmeshed in these attenuated chains of communication also deserve attention, for it is here that the human dimension most clearly emerges. I can only reiterate that there are interesting possibilities for comparison across Asia and for testing the proposition that littoral societies "have more inc common with other littoral societies than they do with their inland neighbors (Pearson 2006, p. 353). Does the received wisdom that women in seagoing communities are relatively independent still hold among, for instance, the pearl divers of Japan and South Korea (Cho 1989; Martinez 2004, p. 47; Norr and Norr 1974, p. 249)? In what ways do cultural singularities explain the differences between female fish traders in southern India and those in the coastal areas of Vietnam or Indonesia (Pham 2004; Ram 1989; Volkman 1994, pp. 574-76)? Although an anthropologist might urge her colleagues to accept the sea as a "place" that, like the land, generates "creative human activity," any historical investigation faces real challenges; as Roderick Ptak has pointed out, official Chinese sources dealing with seafaring rarely reflect the views of ordinary sailors and merchants, and there is little room for integrating China's coastal towns and provinces into a maritime setting (Lowe 2003; Ptak 2001, p. 401). Nevertheless, because our academic orientation is normally territorially grounded, we may have overlooked material that is available to us and in the process have underestimated the importance of the sea-land experience in our representations of Asia. In a recent article Charles Wheeler calls for a "re-thinking" of the place of the sea in Vietnamese history. In his words, "We typically invoke the centrality of water in Vietnamese cultural life, whenever we talk to our students." However, with few exceptions, he goes on, the historical evidence of the sea's significance has remained only supplementary to interpretations that present Vietnam as an "enclosed, earthbound, agrarian society" (Wheeler, 2006, p.126)
In responding to this comment, I turn to the island-rich environment of insular Southeast Asia, [5] and particularly to those areas of the Austronesian world where the symbolism of the sea and of boats is integral to political and social systems (Coedès 1968, pp. 3-4). The intimate relationship between land and sea so clearly articulated in these systems should encourage participants in larger conversations to think more seriously about the place of the oceans in Asian states traditionally characterized as agrarian. In a 1984 conference on Southeast Asia, Pierre-Yves Manguin (1986) spoke of "ship-shape societies" and the range and variety of references he assembled remains impressive. Although some scholars have cautioned against over-reading this symbolic language (Waterson 1990, pp. 20, 93), one cannot deny that the migration of ancient Austronesian-speaking peoples from southern China or Taiwan would have been by boat or that words connected with boating and sea travel are prevalent in linguistic reconstructions of proto-Austronesian vocabularies (Pawley and Pawley 1994, p. 329; Zorc 1994, pp. 543-45). More than three thousand years later, when the Spanish first reached the Philippines in 1521, boats were still the only means of long-distance transport, and there is no evidence of wheeled vehicles (Scott 1994, p. 5).
Island Southeast Asia
In this context, historians can gain much from conversations with archaeologists. The boat-shaped coffins found throughout this water-connected world, often in locations that face the sea, provide convincing evidence that many early societies thought of the afterlife as a place that would be reached after a voyage across water. Indeed, the words for "boat" and "coffin" are sometimes interchangeable, and from very early times "ships of the dead" are a recurring motif in Southeast Asia's indigenous art (Ballard et al 2004, pp. 394-97; Glover 1972, p. 42; Manguin 1986, pp. 193, 196). A striking example of this imaginaire is found on the cover of a well-preserved burial jar discovered in a cave complex on the island of Palawan in the Philippines. Shown in their voyage to the next life, both boatman and passenger wear a band tied over the head and under the jaw, a style of laying out a corpse still found in the southern Philippines centuries later (Fox 1970, pp. 113-114, 123). It is unclear whether any parallels exist between the boat coffins in Southeast Asia and ancient boat burials found in China's Sichuan province, although in both places this mode of interment seems to have been associated with the elite. In the seventeenth century Spanish missionaries thus talked of Filipino chiefs buried in boats "which the natives call barangay"; in one such instance, the body was surrounded by seventy slaves, ammunition and food "as if he were to be as great a pirate in the other life as this" (Blair and Robertson 1903-9, 7: 194; 40: 81; Quirino and Garcia 1958, pp. 396, 415-16; Sage 1992, pp. 67, 140)
Cover of burial jar representing souls sailing to the afterworld, Palawan, Philippines (Fox 1970:114)
The symbolism that linked the sea to the land is also apparent in the house architecture of numerous Indonesian cultures. Though the derivations of curved and allegedly "boat-shaped" roofs in certain societies have been debated (conversely, the best known are the inland societies of Minangkabau and Toraja), studies of communities in eastern Indonesia, notably between Timor and Tanimbar, persistently employ boat terminology in reference, for instance, to the main posts ("masts") of the house and the space under the high roofs ("sails") as well as to other architectural features like the "keel" or "rudder" (de Jonge and van Dijk 1995, pp. 33-34, 74-77; Manguin 1986, pp. 190, 204 n17; Vroklage 1940, pp. 263, 265, 266;). Even when villages are located at some distance from the coast and the economy is based on agriculture rather than seafaring, the association between boats and the human community can still apply, albeit adjusted to an inland environment. In the Sahu (northern Halmahera) village described by Leontine Visser, the ceremonial house is compared to a perahu pulled up on land (kagunga tego-tego) rather than a seagoing boat (Visser 1989, p. 177). Equally, it is not uncommon to find that household relationships are expressed in terms of shipboard life. An early seventeenth-century Bicol dictionary from the Philippines thus glosses the word laygay as both "in command of a ship" and "to issue orders in charge of servants and slaves in the house" (Mintz 2004, 2: 704). More intimately, a kelong, a genre of traditional Makassarese poetry, imagines the union of a husband and wife as being "like two fishing boats/Fishing together the big shiny fish /Tied together for life's long voyage" (Knappert 1999, p. 94; cf. Gonda 1947, pp. 101-05).
Minangkabau house near Bukkitinggi, Sumatra, 2004. Courtesy of Sara Orel
As one might expect, similar metaphors also can be found in regard to community organization. The earliest historical references again come from the Philippines, where Spanish friars noted that the smallest political unit of Tagalog society was called a barangay, or boat (Blair and Robertson 1903-9, 40:83; Manguin 1986, p.189). The same heritage, however, is found through much of eastern Indonesia, and it is against this background that we read the names of villages in central Flores, like Laja (sail), Udi (rudder), Mangu Lewa (high mast), or Kutu (great oar length), and of headmen honored with titles such as "steersman," or "leader of the great perahu" (de Jonge and van Dijk 1995, pp. 40, 55; Röder 1939, pp. 100-1; Vroklage 1940, pp. 268-269). As Visser (1989. p. 177) has noted, the metaphorical conception of the village center as a perahu is widespread in the Austronesian world, but the cultural dynamics of a community built around the concept of a boat have been most graphically described in the Tanimbar Islands in eastern Indonesia. In 1940 Petrus Drabbe published his remarkable account of pre-Christian villages located on cliff-top sites, where the center and place of worship was built in the shape of a stone boat, and in one case was even equipped with an anchor taken from a shipwrecked Dutch steamer. When men were absent on long-distance trading voyages a "crew" of women maintained watch on land. Assuming the same positions as men on a ship – captain, jurumudi (in charge of steering), or jurubatu (responsible for the anchor) – they followed prescribed rituals until the boat returned (Drabbe 1940, pp. 47-51, 140-41). A more recent study by Susan McKinnon has recorded the persistence of many of these practices, including the ceremonial language and dance formations that celebrated the unity of a boat and its crew, and the "friendship voyages" by which intervillage alliances were renewed. Encoding the village as a perahu lying at anchor, she suggests, the stone boat imparted a sense of unity and stability to a people whose cultural memories were infused with legends of migration and resettlement (de Jonge and van Dijk, pp. 76-81; McKinnon 1988, pp. 165-66; 1991, pp. 68-83).
Singing and dancing, people from Sera Island (Tanimbar archipelago) set out to renew their alliance with a village on Yamdena Island, 1980. Courtesy of Susan McKinno
Tanimbar women dance on a stage built in the form of a boat (from Drabbe, 1940)
Boat-shaped stage, Tanimbar (from Drabbe, 1940).
In eastern Indonesia a cultural order that tied the sea to the land has been most clearly identified in relation to villages, but the same models could be easily elevated to higher levels of governance. On the other side of the archipelago the notes accompanying a precolonial map of the Malay state of Perak thus explain that the raja is the captain and that the duties of ministers mirror those of crewmembers, with one identified as "he who wields the starboard paddle" and another "the person who bales the boat if she leaks (Andaya 1979, p. 28; Manguin 1986, p. 193; Shellabear 1885, pp.19-20). By the same token, it was these ruler-centered courts that produced Southeast Asia's impressive corpus of maritime law, providing judicial advice for a multitude of problems that could develop during a voyage, during trading negotiations, or when a ship made landing. "The captain is as a king on board his ship; the steersman is like the prime minister; the person in charge of casting anchor and taking soundings is like the chief of police." Crewmen were expected to follow the same standard of conduct as they would on land, particularly in regard to married women, and one article reads: "Anyone using a mirror facing towards the bow of the ship commits a serious offence, since the captain's wife or concubine might be on board [and her image be reflected]. The punishment is seven lashes and a fine of gold" (Winstedt and de Josselin de Jong 1956, pp. 32, 49, 51, 58).
In promoting the comparative framework that lies at the heart of area studies, one obvious approach would see differences and similarities among sea-oriented communities primarily in economic terms, because their livelihood is so clearly reliant on access to the water and its resources. In the words of a female fish trader in Mandar (southwest Sulawesi), "our garden is the sea" (Norr and Norr 1974; Volkman 1994, pp. 567, 569). There are however, more intangible dimensions. As Raymond Firth and others have emphasized, the uncertainty of a fishing-based economy is great, since "the yield is precarious, the risk considerable," and the spirits of the sea required constant and unremitting propitiation if the fisherman (or occasionally fisherwoman) was to be successful (1984.p. 1147; Kalland 1995, pp. 42-50). In the Philippines the Spanish friar Francisco Colin mentioned the many offerings made to the anito of the sea and the gifts necessary to conciliate other spirits associated with the "rocks, crags, reefs and points along the seashore" (Blair and Robertson 1903-9, pp. 40, 70, 72). Such spirits were particularly prone to anger if a crew ignored prescribed ritual or employed inappropriate words, especially those associated with the land. Traditionally, for example, Acehnese fishermen at sea could not call a mountain by its proper name, gunung, lest waves as high as mountains overwhelm their vessel (Barnes 1996, pp. 295-97). Still today male pearl divers in the eastern Indonesian island of Aru believe that their success depends on developing a rewarding and productive relationship with a demanding "sea-wife" who will guide them to places where the most valuable pearls are located. Because a diver's "land-wife" and his "sea-wives" work together, a man's domestic relations must be harmonious (Spyer 2000, pp. 17-18, 137-38). A belief in the ability of underwater deities to affect the well-being of an entire community is perhaps best attested in central Java, frequently and misleadingly categorized as an agrarian kingdom. Its royal center (today identified with Jogjakarta), however, was located not far from the beach of Parangtritis, home of Ratu Kidul, goddess of the southern ocean. Periodically, her mystical sexual union with the Javanese ruler rejuvenated the realm and guaranteed its prosperity (Ricklefs 1998, pp. 6-13).
The intimate association that correlates the fertility of the sea with the fertility of the land is nicely illustrated in the ritual attached to boatbuilding itself, and of the many examples available I use here Michael Southon's case study from the island of Buton, near Sulawesi. Here the whole construction of the boat mirrors the union of men and women, and it is understood that an owner and his wife should have sexual relations before the keel is joined to ensure good fortune. In this sense the boat symbolizes the partnership implicit in marriage; in the words of one informant "The husband is like the leader or captain . . . [but] it's the woman who knows the contents of the perahu . . . it's the woman who orders things in the perahu." The presence of a pregnant woman at a launching can thus be a potent sign of the boat's birth and an expression of hopes for its future cargo-laden prosperity. Further, the relationship between those who wait at home is supposed to mimic the father-son relations that ideally operate while the boat is at sea; a captain's wife should thus treat the family of her husband's crew members not as employees but as her children and relatives (Southon 1995, pp. 93-119; see also de Jonge and van Dijk 1995, pp. 40-41, 54-55, 70-71; Liebner 1993, p. 25).
In the constant and finely-tuned interaction between land and sea, seasonal shifts in the patterns of winds and currents were critical to the timing of agricultural as well as maritime activities. In several areas of eastern Indonesian and the western Pacific the swarming of sea worms (nale or palolo) occurs once or twice within a given period of the lunar year and for this reason has traditionally been used as a calendrical marker. In some places one even finds the appearance of the worms – themselves a symbol of fertility – personified in a female spirit, Inya Nale (Ecklund 1977, pp. 4-11; Hoskins 1993, pp. 90-91, 342-44; Mondragón 2004, p. 293). Before their conversion to Islam or Christianity, sculptors in eastern Indonesia represented this sea/land/fertility nexus in statues of the founder-mother (luli), often carved against a tree rising out of a boat, which in turn calls up associations between male-female unity and the womb itself. In combination, the boat, tree and ancestress become a forceful image of fecundity and new birth (de Jonge and van Dijk 1995, pp. 54-55).
Luli carving, Indonesia. Courtesy of Jerome Feldman
In a different medium and always the work of women, a similar correlation is evident in the Lampung ship-cloths from southern Sumatra. The boat motifs for which these textiles are rightfully famous are obviously far more than ships. The masts sprout leaves and the hulls are decorated with luxuriant tree-like forms; ancestors crowd the decks, while dugong and turtles swim in the surrounding sea. Conceived as a total design, each piece becomes an individual affirmation of the centrality of procreation and the absolute necessity of continuing the lineage (Gittinger 1976; Solyom 2004, 95).
Example of a Lampung "ship-cloth." Courtesy of Bronwen and Garett Solyom
As we place this maritime-oriented world in a larger framework, it is also understandable that the legitimacy of influences from outside is often enhanced through an association with the ocean. Accordingly, legends found throughout Southeast Asia frequently recall some legendary figure, a "stranger-king" who arrives by sea, marries a local woman and becomes the conduit by which a new cultural order is instituted. In explaining the acceptance of Indian ideas, an oft-cited example comes from the middle of the fifth century, when two Chinese envoys to a "country" called Funan, apparently located in southern Cambodia, recorded a myth of origin that tells how a local princess paddles out to meet the vessel of an incoming Brahman. The latter gives the princess a cloth to cover her naked body and makes her tie her hair in a knot; following their union he becomes ruler of Cambodia (Coedès 1968, p. 37). The spread of Islam, too, is commonly attributed to merchants and traders who appear on ships, but one particularly graphic image from the Chronicle of Kutai (eastern Borneo) dating to about 1620, describes how the first teacher of Islam arrived from neighboring Makassar riding on the back of a swordfish (Jones 1979, p. 147). The use of the maritime metaphor to present Islamic mysticism in ways that were intelligible to local audiences is effectively captured in a seventeenth-century Malay poem that speaks of the gnostic setting sail on a perilous sea where "many ships sink/Its surges are immensely fierce/Its reefs are as sharp as spears/If [the seafarer] is not experienced and skilled enough,/[His] ship will strand and break into pieces" (Braginsky 1975; 2004, pp. 148-49).
A similar pattern could be tracked in the Philippines, where the incorporation of pre-Christian iconography is evident in statues of the Immaculate Conception; one of her attributes, the stylized crescent moon, was at times thickened so that she appears to be standing on a curved boat (Gatbonton 1979, p. 105; Zóbel de Ayala 1963, p.109). Presumably, such associations would have been helpful in the missionizing project. Vietnamese fishermen, for instance, readily likened the Madonna's swirling veil and surrounding clouds to a small boat riding on the waves, and saw her as possessing protective powers like those of Mazu, the goddess of the oceans (Forest 1998, 3: 286). The picture of Christ as a friend and guardian of fishermen would have been equally compelling. A boat-shaped lectern in a church on the main island of the Sangir group north of Sulawesi, with an attached plaque bearing the biblical reference Mark 4: 35-41, reminds the congregation of how Jesus calmed the storm, much to the awed amazement of his disciples: "Even the wind and waves obey him."
In sum, the Southeast Asian examples suggest that the real and symbolic communication between sea and land merits closer attention from those who study the region we term Asia. This is far from saying, of course, that the oceans were seen as an unquestioned bearer of positive influences or that their frightening and unpredictable powers were ever regarded with anything less than deep respect. The tragedy of the 2004 tsunami still hangs over us, but the region has since experienced numerous other destructive typhoons and tidal waves. Even in normal times tropical storms could bring about shipwreck, and the shallow waters could hide reefs and rocks on which vessels could well founder. One of the most interesting areas of maritime studies has been the growth of underwater archaeology, sometimes producing quite spectacular discoveries (e.g. Flecker 2002). Nor do I mean to present coastal societies as Utopian communities, living in harmony with each other and exemplifying a mutually beneficial relationship between land and water. In her study of the South China Sea, Dian Murray (1987, pp. 14-19) notes that pirates were often former fishermen, and for many orang laut groups in Southeast Asia raiding under a ruler's auspices could be a seasonal occupation. From the late eighteenth century, fleets of Ilanun raiders from Mindanao annually swept down into the Indonesian archipelago, and the terror felt by their victims is vividly portrayed in a Malay account of how one trader "was strangled with his shoulder sash and left to rot. His penis was cut off and stuffed into his mouth" (Ali Haji 1982, p. 262). Yet a great sea raider could still be respected, and the perception of the ocean as a pathway to fortune is encapsulated in the Malay phrase "mencari rezeki", to seek one's fortune, which became a code-term for officially sanctioned piracy. Indeed, it was the image of a journey by sea that an unknown Sufi poet (probably from Sumatra) felt best conveyed the idea of a spiritual path that would lead to personal enlightenment: "Oh youth, know thyself!/ Like a boat is thy body . . . Avail thyself of a rudder and compass/Equip thy boat:/Such is the way of perfection for man" (Braginsky 1975, p. 414; Maier 1992, pp. 2-5). What Australians of my vintage called "o.e.," or overseas experience, remained for Southeast Asians a source of prestige and new knowledge, whether it was simply to a neighboring island, to Mecca, or in the colonial period, to study in Europe. Ultimately this enlargement of an individual's world almost always involved travel by sea.
This brings me to my last point. Although generalizations are always problematic, I follow O.W. Wolters (1999, p. 46) in suggesting that an environment of acceptance and openness to the outside, "a tradition of hospitality," was generally characteristic of coastal and seagoing communities. The sailor who has a wife in every port may be a cultural cliché, but it had very real significance in a trading environment where a family base was absolutely vital for a merchant to pursue his business. Kinship relations, both real and fictive, were key elements in creating and maintaining the personal relationships that underpinned an economy where land and sea were interdependent. The vignette I use to illustrate this point is one of my favorites. It concerns John Pope, a young Englishman, whose insightful and well-written diary records his experiences as a seventeen-year-old apprentice sailing between India, Burma, Sumatra and Melaka in the 1780s. An early port of call after leaving India was Kedah on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, where he was received in an audience by the ruler and the king's merchant, a Tamil Muslim from Coromandel. The latter's son (probably born of a Malay mother) was about the same age as John, and they became quite close, spending a good deal of time in each other's company and even discussing matters like religious differences. "My new friend Dul Baddul," wrote John, "wishes much that I should stay here, promises me everything that I can wish." On John's departure Dul gave him a kris "inlaid with gold"; in return, Pope presented his "new friend" with his own silver buckles and a pencil case, "the only things of any value in my possession," and promised to learn to write Jawi (Malay in modified Arabic) so that they could exchange letters. "We parted," he wrote, "not without many tears on both sides" (Bulley 1992, p. 60).
The year 2005 marked the 600th anniversary of the first of Zheng He's voyages, an impressive vision of a world that could be connected via water. At the same time, these voyages contributed to the goal of knowing, describing and taming the oceans and thus of confirming their conceptual subservience to the land. Today we live in communities that have little appreciation of the importance of the sea in the social and economic lives of early societies. Roads have replaced rivers, airplanes have displaced long-distance ocean travel, and cartographic traditions and the demands of modern states have asserted the supremacy of land-based cultures. In this essay I have tried to make a simple point: Given the physical environment in which most of us operate, we have to work hard to imagine how it might have been in Manguin's "ship-shape societies." Yet regardless of whether the goal is to engage students or interact with colleagues, I would argue that the effort is worthwhile. More than twenty years ago Wolters remarked that "the sea provides an obvious geographical framework for discussing possibilities of region-wide [Southeast Asian] historical themes." He went on to stress, however, the unity of "'the single ocean' – the vast expanse of water from the coasts of eastern Africa and Western Asia to the immensely long coastal line of the Indian subcontinent and on to China" (Wolters 1999, pp. 42, 44). The "transocean" standpoint may enable us not merely to work with a larger canvas, but to capture something of the human encounters that underwrite the communication between areas and between peoples. Although there is probably no way we can be what Rhoads Murphey once termed a "complete Asianist" (Murphey 1988), we can do our best to think across the boundaries of disciplines, areas and a presentism that privileges the land. As we work ever harder to bring Asia into the academic mainstream, an understanding of the ocean and of how it shaped the lives of real people may open up new perspectives on the intertwined histories that should be integral to our projection of "Asia."
Barbara Andaya is Professor of Asian Studies and Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Hawai'i. She was president of the Association for Asian Studies, 2005-6.
This article is a revised version of her presidential address, delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in San Francisco, April 2006. The original was published in the Journal of Asian Studies 64, 4, (2006). It is reproduced here with permission from the Association and from the publisher of JAS, Cambridge University Press. Posted at Japan Focus on April 17, 2007.
[1] In a similar mode, Paul D'Arcy argues that the oceanic environment transverses the divisions traditionally employed in Pacific Studies by linking Polynesia and Micronesia (D'Arcy 2006: 9). See also Pearson 2006, who argues for a world-wide consideration of littoral societies.
[2] References here are extensive, but for a recent work see Barendse 2002
[3] "The Seas of East Asia," p. 19; see also Wheeler 2006.
[4] Reference kindly supplied by Anna Nagamine
[5] Currently Indonesia is said to comprise over 17,000 islands and the Philippines around 7100. In both cases the definition of "island" is open to debate. One needs to remember that there are areas, like Timor, that lack a sea-faring tradition (McWilliam 2002:6).
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At age 26, Elizabeth Taylor's third marriage ended (with Michael Todd's death in a plane crash) as she solidified her legend on the big screen – and in the gossip pages.
At age 26, Lindsay Lohan is, well, playing Elizabeth Taylor.
The almost cruel stunt casting aside, the coming of "Liz & Dick" on Lifetime Sunday, spotlights surface similarities and stark differences between the two star-crossed actresses. But they are linked, beyond the TV movie: Lohan is, in varying respects, a creation, beneficiary and victim of the modern celebrity culture that Taylor helped fuel and was nearly consumed by during her nearly seven decades in the public eye.
There's a huge divergence from there – by the time she was Lohan's age, Taylor had managed to channel her demons into explosive performances in the likes of "Giant" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
Lohan, of course, hasn't begun to approach Taylor's stature as an actress and movie superstar, though it's too easy to dismiss her as a Reality TV-like figure famous for being famous, or more often infamous. She's shown glimmers of talent, particularly as a comedic actress in 2004's "Mean Girls."
There's a sad and almost comic made-for-TV irony in Lohan tackling perhaps the most tempestuous period of Taylor's life: her two marriages to Richard Burton. The pairing brought Taylor's most pronounced public highs and lows, personally and professionally (cheesy "Cleopatra" vs. powerful "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?"), as celebrity watching began morphing into blood sport in the 1960s. Taylor's career never quite recovered after her years with Burton.
Judging from early reviews, "Liz & Dick" doesn't seem destined to instantly revive Lohan's career. The Hollywood Reporter called the Lifetime flick an "instant classic of unintentional hilarity" and likened it to "a lost 'Saturday Night Live' skit." That's a particularly apt comparison, considering the enduring image of John Belushi's 1978 "Weekend Update" imitation of Taylor as an aging, obese, chicken-chomping glutton.
Taylor outlasted Belushi, and eventually regained much of her luster, even if she basked largely in the afterglow of past achievements. She died last year at age 79, never far from the now-online celebrity news machine that records Lohan's every misstep, but with obituary recountings of her movie prowess a horse-length ahead of scandal rehashes. Playing Taylor, even to unintended laughs, hopefully will give Lohan a lesson on how to go from news stories portraying her as train wreck to rebuilding her image as a still-young actress trying to get back on track.
Hester is founding director of the award-winning, multi-media NYCity News Service at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He is the former City Editor of the New York Daily News, where he started as a reporter in 1992. Follow him on Twitter.


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SNOW HILL — Hoping to clear the air with the public and mend fences with the Maryland Comptroller's Office, the Worcester County Commissioners addressed for the first time this week the recent controversy over an illegal purchase of $175,000 worth of alcohol from Alabama.
The commissioners admitted to making an error in their interpretation of state law and last week agreed to send the entire shipment of alcohol back to Alabama. Commission President Bud Church also visited Comptroller Peter Franchot to discuss the situation in person on Wednesday with Administrator Gerry Mason.
"While we certainly had no intention of breaking the law, we have every intention of providing the best possible liquor pricing for the more than 200 local bars, restaurants and retail stores who purchase alcoholic beverages from the county," Church said. "That remains our steadfast commitment since we assumed liquor control operations last July."
Church explained that the decision to purchase from out-of-state was based on the savings Worcester was able to negotiate with the Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board (ABC).
"We projected $3 million in annual savings," said Church of the partnership.
On the first shipment alone the $175,000 total was a savings of $55,840 as compared to what an identical purchase from the Maryland Beverage Journal wholesaler was priced at, even after shipping and handling and excise taxes, according to Church. It represents a 12-percent markup over cost.
In 2011, the commission noted that the average markup on wholesale purchases made by the Liquor Control Board (LCB), the quasi-governmental agency that was replaced by the county controlled Department of Liquor Control (DLC) July 1, were in the 30-40 percent range on average.
While it was an unarguably sweet deal for Worcester, it was also blatantly illegal, according to the Comptroller's Office.
Comptroller Peter Franchot issued a stern letter to DLC Director Bobby Cowger last week clarifying his department's view of the situation in no uncertain terms.
"Allow me to be as clear as possible," wrote Franchot. "First, your purchase of alcohol from the State of Alabama was illegal. It was illegal because the State of Alabama had no license or permit at the time that would make it a lawful supplier to the DLC."
Franchot went on to shoot down the idea that Alabama getting a license sometime after the sale would "retroactively legitimize" the original shipment. He made the point in response to the DLC keeping the Alabama shipment housed for months in a Delaware warehouse while waiting on a permit application allowing Alabama to sell in Maryland to clear, which as of this week it has not, though it was filed in mid-November.
In response to the letter, which promised "vigorous enforcement" from the Comptroller's office if the DLC didn't address the situation, the commission agreed to return the shipment as soon as possible.
"Ideally, we'd like to ship it today," said Church earlier this week.
However, he claimed the county is waiting for a window of opportunity where the alcohol can be shipped back for the lowest cost. Though no shipping dates could be confirmed, Worcester Public Information Officer Kim Moses did reveal that shipping the inventory back will cost $2,700.
Church reiterated several times that the DLC was not being caught with its hand in the cookie jar, but that the $175,000 purchase was an honest mistake made over a different interpretation of the same laws Franchot referenced in his letter.
In that letter, Franchot references Article 2B 15-205 of Maryland law where the Worcester DLC was given authority to purchase "…wine and liquor from any source for resale." Franchot called it "at best preposterous, if not disingenuous" to assume that Article gave Worcester a free hand to purchase alcohol from states that don't have a permit to sell in Maryland.
Church stated that legal advice given to the DLC offered other interpretations, but clarified that Worcester would respect the Comptroller's opinion.
"There was never, let me repeat, never, ever any intent to do anything outside of the law," he said.
"We put them on notice; we didn't hide it," added Church, referring to the DLC making Franchot aware of the purchase back when it took place Oct. 31.
In the interest of avoiding any bad blood between Worcester and the Comptroller's office, Church visited Franchot in Annapolis on Wednesday.
"We kissed and made up," said Church of the meeting, which he described as brief but successful.
After the dust has settled from the incident, Worcester appears to have gotten off lightly, with no sanctions or fines from the comptroller. County officials also note that, as of this week, they have no reason to believe the Alabama ABC will return anything less than the full $175,000. There is still, however, the $2,700 shipping fee which, because the DLC is now a county agency, will have to be footed by tax payers.
Church was of the opinion that it was a live-and-learn kind of experience and hopes any bad memories of the incident will fade in time, especially if the Alabama ABC does become licensed to sell in Maryland.


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In Summer 2009 navigation period UIA expands its fleet by 2 new Boeing 737-800 aircraft
In July and September 2009 Ukraine International Airlines will be the first airline in Ukraine to operate 2 new generation Boeing 737-800 aircrafts, delivered from Boeing plant in Seattle.
That will be the first new generation Boeing 737-800 aircraft operated by the Ukrainian crew and maintained by UIA technical service.
The new generation 800s are equipped with the latest CFM (56-7B26) engines that feature a number of technical improvements ranging from lower fuel burn to increased reliability making the aircraft more efficient, environmentally friendly and easier to maintain. The aircrafts' improved technical specifications and lower maintenance requirement increase range and utilization and make it possible to expand the number of direct flights available to Ukrainian passengers.
All future aircraft on the UIA fleet will come with 'winglets', (extended raised wingtip devices) that are designed to improve the aerodynamic efficiency of the aircraft by reducing drag allowing for further fuel savings, and, consequently, lower carbon emissions.
The airline intends to use the new aircraft with up to 189 passenger seats on high density routes including charter, popular leisure and high load scheduled destinations allowing for more efficient fleet utilization.
Two new Boeing 737-800 aircraft are scheduled for delivery in 2010 as a part of UIA's long term programme of fleet renewal and expansion.
The new aircraft with the very latest in aircraft and engine technology available in the world today will enhance UIA's leadership position on the Ukrainian aviation market.


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This set of white RepRap parts were created in molds, instead of being printed by another RepRap. [Mark A. Ganter] of the University of Washington admits that this breaks the idea of a 3D printer that is self-replicating. But the molds – which were created by tweaking Prusa Mendel parts to be mold friendly – have the ability to produce every plastic part necessary to build your own RepRap and they can do it much faster. Once the molds were completed [Mark] and his students were able to produce a full set of parts in just 30 minutes, cutting as much as 14 hours off of the time it would have taken to print the parts. Still not convinced? How about this: the molds can be created by a 3D printer or by using a high-resolution power printing method like they have here.
The process starts by printing master parts, then creating a silicone RTV mold from them. Once the molds are ready, [Mark's] team pours polyurethane into them and waits for it to harden. They plan to share the STL files in less than a week so that you can make your own molds to use to build your RepRap army.


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Take one child (and a Mum!) in wellie boots, a tray of bright paints and lots of cardboard sheets.
Dip feet in paint and walk, stomp, dance, jump and run to your heart's content!
Create a beautiful, rainbow, mess of colours.
Examine the lovely patterns created from the prints and compare them!
Find other things to dip and print with, or roll with!
What a lovely end result! Abstract toddler art at its finest 🙂
This activity is good for:
* creativity on a large scale
* outdoor play
* colour mixing and exploration
* examining the effect of printing with objects
* comparing big and small prints
* gross motor play: jumping, stomping, striding, tip-toeing, skipping
* having a HUGE amount of fun together (adult participation compulsory!)


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Standard Price: Rs. 23999/- + ST
Subject to availability of seats. Terms & Conditions
Hurry Register Now, Limited seats !
Class room time: Time: 09:00 am to 06:30 pm
Question &Clarifications please contact: Smitha- 9008587999
Email : firstname.lastname@example.com email@example.com
Software developers with experience in Scala, Python, SQL coding Individuals familiar with Data Science topics.
-Interactive classes
-Our trainers have over 12–15 years of relevant industry experience.
-Access to our cloud server for testing.
-Hands-on training on how to approach a Spark project.
-Weekend mentoring discussions with our technical experts.
-Quality assurance: if you are not satisfied, you can attend our next session with a different trainer for free!!
-Step-by-step approach to prepare you for the Big Data certification.
-Life-time access to the learning management systems (LMS).
-Technical support (via email) for assignments, queries.
-Batch rescheduling flexibility! Incase you miss a class… fret not! You can join the next batch.
Day 1
-Why Spark: Introduction.
-Spark Basics (installation, operations).
-Problem with traditional large-scale systems.
-Spark Shell.
-RDDs/HDFS data locality.
-Functional Programming with Spark.
-Spark and the Hadoop Ecosystem.
-Spark and MapReduce.
-Running Spark on cluster.
Day 2
-Standalone cluster.
-Parallel Programming with Spark.
-RDD Partitions and working with partitions.
-Executing parallel operations.
-Caching and Persistence.
-Developing Spark Applications.
-SparkContext and configuring Spark properties.
-Building and running a Spark application
-Spark-Streaming and developing its applications
-Improving Spark performance
-Shared Variables: Broadcast Variables, Accumulators.
Spark is a new, niche and engaging concept that is fast catching up. Due to its high performance/dependable applications, several businesses large and small are already adopting this concept across a wide range of industries.
Currently, there are only a handful of professionals who have in depth understanding of Spark. The demand for developers with certified expertise is growing and there is no better academy than Netscientium to aid you in sprucing up your skill. We offer a two-day course that provides you end-to-end knowledge of Spark and its operations.
Be niche. Become a certified Spark developer.


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Recently the systems engineering team @ Cloud9ers ($dayjob) has been busy building the infrastructure for a very ambitious and large scale project for one of our customers. The project involves tons of distributed programming besides lots of systems work as well. I'd like to share with the community a small tidbit of information. It's often some small things the one sometimes gives a moment to admire, and hereby share!
The problem
- We are building a private cloud. Ubuntu server instances running on that are cloned from a master template
- While most clouds provide what I call "Instance Identity" information through some pre-known web service URI, in our case we utilize VMware's "Invoke-VMScript" API to run scripts inside the cloned template, thus customizing it and giving it its identity, then puppet takes it from there. Note that we're using a simple vCenter+ESXi (no vCloud stuff here) no shared storage even!
Ok the real problem
- Editing the template, and publishing it across the cloud (a topic for another post) takes considerable time! I wanted a way to be able to quickly update my identity scripts without having to re-build and re-publish images
- A script with a trivially simple (thus mostly fixed) "bootstrap" section, which auto-updates itself from github and relaunches its-new-self!
Nothing ground breaking, but still a cool trick eh! Yeah I could have added a broken this into multiple scripts and maybe run-parts them. Of-course this script is quite basic, but it's meant to remain that way since the heavy lifting is puppet's responsibility!
Note: To run this successfully the user this is run under, should have passwordless sudo rights to run "ip" and to run "itself" :) Got cool ideas, thoughts or comments? Leave me a message
Note: To run this successfully the user this is run under, should have passwordless sudo rights to run "ip" and to run "itself" :) Got cool ideas, thoughts or comments? Leave me a message


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Why do planets rotate?
Why do the planets rotate? What force cause them to rotate?
There is no force that causes the planets to rotate. Most of the rotation comes about from the conservation of angular momentum. Angular momentum is given by L=m*w*r2 where m is the mass, w is the angular velocity in radians per second, and r is the radius of the circular motion. Due to conservation of angular momentum, if the radius of the orbit decreases, then its angular velocity must increase (as the mass is constant).
All planetary and stellar systems are born from the collapse of dense interstellar clouds. The clouds may originally be very large (even thousands of light years across). Consider a portion of the cloud the collapses from a size of a light year or so to the size of the solar system. That is a huge change in the size of the system. So, the very slight rotation that the cloud has in the beginning is increased dramatically when the collapse takes place. In fact, this is one of the barriers in star formation: there is excess angular momentum and there has to be a way of losing angular momentum before you can form a star.
Anyway, the bottom line is that stars like the Sun spin from the original angular momentum that was there in the solar nebula from which it formed. Not only that, all orbital motion of the planets (including the spin) is due to this orginal angular momentum.
You are saying that original angular momentum of the cloud causes orbital motions and rotations of the planets(mostly). But in the case of orbital motions we have gravitational force that gives us some restrictions of movement(Kepler laws,for example).
What I am saying is that there will be no planets if there was no initial angular momentum in the primordial solar nebula. If a nebula with absolutely no rotation collapses, then there will only be a central non-rotating star and there will not be any planets. Planets form out of a protostellar disk, which itself forms only because of the initial angular momentum of the cloud. The dynamics of a rotating body is of course controlled by forces like gravity. Kepler's laws are a direct consequence of gravity.
Are there some laws also in the case of rotations?
The only thing that has to be kept in mind in rotation is that it results in a centrifugal acceleration that points radially from the center of motion. Hence, there has to be some force that conteracts this acceleration; otherwise the body will fly away (in case of orbital motion) or will disintegrate (in case of spinning). In the case of orbital motion, the counteracting force is gravity; gravity causes the body to continually fall towards the center, and this exactly conteracts the force resulting from the centripetal acceleration. In the case of a spinning object, it is the self-adhesion of the body itself that keeps it together. This results in a limit for how fast an object can rotate and still keep itself together. If it rotates too fast, the outward acceleration felt by the elements in the body may be more than the force that keeps them bonded together, and if this happens, the body breaks up. Other than this, there is no real law concerning rotations. (Note that rotational motion involves conservation of angular momentum just like linear motion conserves linear momentum).


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As pressure for profit increases, oil giants look toward shale technology
Shale oil engineer Oscar Portillo spends his days drilling as many as five wells at once – without ever setting foot on a rig.
Part of a team working to cut the cost of drilling a new shale well by a third, Portillo works from a Royal Dutch Shell Plc office in suburban Houston, his eyes darting among 13 monitors flashing data on speed, temperature and other metrics as he helps control rigs more than 500 miles (805 km) away in the Permian Basin, the largest U.S. oilfield.
For the last decade, smaller oil companies have led the way in shale technology, slashing costs by as much as half with breakthroughs such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking that turned the United States into the world's fastest-growing energy exporter.
Now, oil majors that were slow to seize on shale are seeking further efficiencies by adapting technologies for highly automated offshore operations to shale and pursuing advances in digitalization that have reshaped industries from auto manufacturing to retail.
If they are successful, the U.S. oil industry's ability to bring more wells to production at lower cost could amp up future output and company profits. The firms could also frustrate the ongoing effort by The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) effort to drain a global oil glut.
"We're bringing science into the art of drilling wells," Portillo said.
The technological push comes amid worries that U.S. shale gains are slowing as investors press for higher financial returns. Many investors want producers to restrain spending and focus on generating higher returns, not volume, prompting some to pull back on drilling.
Production at a majority of publicly traded shale producers rose just 1.3 % over the first three quarters this year, according to Morgan Stanley.
But many U.S. shale producers vowed during third quarter earnings disclosures to deliver higher returns through technology, with many forecasting aggressive output hikes into 2018.
Chevron Corp is using drones equipped with thermal imaging to detect leaks in oil tanks and pipelines across its shale fields, avoiding traditional ground inspections and lengthy shutdowns.
Ryan Lance, chief executive of ConocoPhillips – the largest U.S. independent oil and gas producer – sees ample opportunity to boost both profits and output. Conoco also oversees remote drilling operations in a similar way to Shell.
"The people that don't have shale in their portfolios don't understand it, frankly," Lance said in an interview. "They think it's going to go away quickly because of the high [production] decline rates, or that the resource is not nearly that substantial. They're wrong on both counts."
Shell, in an initiative called "iShale," has marshalled technology from a dozen oilfield suppliers, including devices from subsea specialist TechnipFMC Plc that separate fracking sand from oil and well-control software from Emerson Electric Co to bring more automation and data analysis to shale operations.
One idea borrowed from deepwater projects is using sensors to automatically adjust well flows and control separators that divvy natural gas, oil and water. Today, these subsea systems are expensive because they are built to operate at the extreme pressures and temperatures found miles under the ocean's surface.
Shell's initiative aims to create cheaper versions for onshore production by incorporating low-cost sensors similar to those in Apple Inc'sWatch, eliminating the need for workers to visit thousands of shale drilling rigs to read gauges and manually adjust valves. Shell envisions shale wells that predict when parts are near mechanical failure and schedule repairs automatically.
By next year, the producer wants to begin remote fracking of wells, putting workers in one place to oversee several projects. It also would add solar panels and more powerful batteries to well sites to reduce electricity and diesel costs.
Oil firms currently spend about US$5.9 million to drill a new shale well, according to consultancy Rystad Energy. Shell expects to chop that cost to less than US$4 million apiece by the end of the decade.
"There is still very little automation," said Amir Gerges, head of Shell's Permian operations. "We haven't scratched the surface."
Much of the new technology is focused on where rather than how to drill.
"There is no amount of technology that can improve bad geology," said Mark Papa, CEO of shale producer Centennial Resource Development Inc
Anadarko Petroleum Statoil and others are using DNA sequencing to pinpoint high potential areas, collecting DNA from microbes in oil to search for the same DNA in rock samples. ConocoPhillip's MRI techniques also borrow from medical advances.
ConocoPhillips next year will start using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to analyse Permian rock samples and find the best drilling locations, a technique the company first developed for its Alaskan offshore operations.
EOG Resources Inc last year began using a detailed analysis of the oil quality of its fields. The analysis, designed by Houston start-up Premier Oilfield Laboratories, helps to speed decisions on fracking locations and avoid less productive sites.
Premier has reduced the time needed to analyze seismic data to find oil reserves from days or weeks to seconds. Such efficiencies serve two purposes, said Nathan Ganser, Premier's director of geochemical services.
"It's not only removing costs that are superfluous," he said. "It's boosting production."


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- Home
- Departments
- Marketing Department
Marketing Department
The Marketing Department focuses on enhancing and implementing city-wide branding strategies, image development, communications and public information for all media outlets. With this standardized and centralized information portal, communication, marketing and promotions, this program optimizes the City's media capital and identifies additional resources to position the City for tourism, business attraction and business retention.
Responsibilities include the following:
The Marketing Department serves as a centralized information portal for the public and employees by developing and implementing public information strategies as well as coordinating internal communications.
Responsibilities include the following:
- Assisting the City's departments with public information campaigns and marketing initiatives;
- Drafting, designing and distributing all print and electronic materials including brochures,
pamphlets and fliers, to foster public information strategies of all City departments; - Developing and distributing press releases about City activities, programs and news to the media;
- Responding to all media inquiries regarding City programs, events, etc,;
- Developing and distributing the City's newsletter, Miramar Today, a weekly e-newsletter about City programs, services, events, activities and city issues;
- Developing and distributing the City's e-magazine, City Beat, a monthly e-magazine about City programs, services, events, activities and city issues;
- Developing and managing postings on the City's social media accounts;
- Managing content on Miramar TV, the City's
on demand video library and cable-access channel; - Creating content on the back of the City of Miramar's utility bill statements and fliers inserted in the utility bills;
- Developing, producing and placing advertising including broadcast and print advertisements in publications and venues;
- Maintaining the It's Right Here In Miramar web radio station, to provide residents and visitors with public service announcements and up-to-date information about Commission Updates, weather, special events and more. There are also 2 live shows weekly that feature Miramar businesses and residents. The City's web radiostation broadcasts 24 hours a day on TuneIn Radio.


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A new exhibition by Karl Maughan at the Gow Langsford Gallery is not a new departure in subject and style, but it shows further increase in the sheer flamboyance of the painter's technique.
As usual the subjects are gardens filled with flowering shrubs of many kinds, bisected by a sunlit path and backed by a cloudless sky of unvarying blue. The composition of these spectacular works is varied a little, to their advantage, by an arch in Rakehou Roa, which provides a contrast in light and shade, and an overhanging fringe of leafage in Beaconsfield Valley which emphasises the depth of the work.
This pelmet of leaves emphasises the genuinely fascinating quality of the work after the immediate impact of the stunning high-key colour of the flowers. The dark green overhang shows carefully studied pattern shapes, but the effect of light is conveyed by a series of flourishing touches of yellow along the lower edge of the leaves.
The same flair also deftly moulds absolutely convincing roses with three or four brush strokes and repeats the feat again and again. This flair in handling paint is worthy of Manet. Maughan does the same with lilacs, hydrangeas, rhododendrons and a multiplicity of other flowers. The character of the flowers is captured too. The golden daisies in Halcombe Road do not all turn their faces to the viewer as happens in most flower paintings. They come at all angles. Other colours in the same paintings are unnatural, notably some foliage in blue, but are necessary to make the colour composition sing.
The result is not, despite the titles, a picture of a particular garden but a work on a large scale painted with great dexterity, impressive at a distance and fascinating at close range. They convey no sense of labour but rather pure delight in colour, shape and painting.
The Corban Estate Arts Centre is hosting a remarkable exhibition. In the early 1970s Brent Wong was considered one of our leading artists. In those days his paintings of rolling hills, characteristic of areas near Wellington, beneath bright skies with tumultuous clouds, had an uneasy, surrealist power. Enigmatic objects, sometimes abstract constructions, sometimes houses, hovered in the sky.
Later Wong abandoned this style for a different pre-occupation - light. He painted luminous circles and landscapes as atmospheric as Turner watercolours. For a while he stopped painting and was lost to the art scene.
The exhibition at Corban Estate is curiously titled Abandoned Works. It is made up of works that remained in his studio because he was not happy with them. His quality control must have been stringent because this exhibition has some startling paintings in the early style and some particularly striking landscapes flooded with light.
The show has three parts. The first is Surrealist Beginnings 1971-1974. The paintings in this room are similar to the ones in public galleries everywhere in New Zealand. The Wandering Land with a slice of land floating above the hills is as good as any done at this time. Snowstorm, with a different variety of cloud and a snail coming over the ridge of the hills, is a failed experiment, as is Volcanic Landscape with Still Life which is crowded with a jug and a balloon. Yet the works with houses and ruins instead of the shapes still retain their metaphysical force.
The second section is The Emergence of the Cloud where buildings are enhanced by the play of light, particularly on clouds. Some are simplified as in the plain Hill, Layered Cloud. Extra detail like some obtrusive butterflies in one work show some confusion of intent.
In the third room the paintings, some as recent as 2008, have a metaphysical feel. Tangible objects are almost absent except for a bright moon in Lunar Halo and landscape in the large but delicate Dust Dark Coast. Abandoned works these may be but they retain considerable potency and offer worthwhile insight into the development of an important painter.
Roberta Thornley has an exhibition called I Will Meet You There at the Tim Melville Gallery. The image with this title is a charming photograph of a grassy glade with a pattern of sunlight but the highlights are portraits of young men and women.
She finds one answer to the problem of making a portrait of an unknown sitter interesting as an image complete in itself by going back to the manner of Victorian photographer, the celebrated Julia Margaret Cameron. Backgrounds are dark and the light plays across features and shoulders. The profile shot of Max is close to a direct quotation of Cameron's style.
Most striking of all is Gabrielle, where a dip of neckline reveals the shadows of the collarbones, the tower of the neck and the lovely line of the cheek. The eyes are startlingly blue. It works as an image of character and grace without forcing or unnecessary drama. The art of Roberta Thornley continues to develop.


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Heart Disease, Electrocardiogram, and Specialized EKGs
An electrocardiogram (also called EKG or ECG) is a test that records the electrical activity of your heart through small electrode patches attached to the skin of your chest, arms, and legs. An EKG may be part of a routine physical exam or it may be used as a test for heart disease. An EKG can be used to further investigate symptoms related to heart problems.
EKGs are quick, safe, painless, and inexpensive tests that are routinely performed if a heart condition is suspected.
Your doctor uses the EKG to:
- Assess your heart rhythm
- Diagnose poor blood flow to the heart muscle (ischemia)
- Diagnose a heart attack
- Evaluate certain abnormalities of your heart, such as an enlarged heart
How Should I Prepare for an EKG?
To prepare for an EKG:
- Avoid oily or greasy skin creams and lotions the day of the test. They interfere with the electrode-skin contact.
- Avoid full-length hosiery, because electrodes need to be placed directly on the legs.
- Wear a shirt that can be easily removed to place the leads on the chest.
What Happens During an EKG
During an EKG, a technician will attach 10 electrodes with adhesive pads to the skin of your chest, arms, and legs. Men may have chest hair shaved to allow a better connection. You will lie flat while the computer creates a picture, on graph paper, of the electrical impulses traveling through your heart. This is called a "resting" EKG. This same test may also be used to monitor your heart during exercise.
It takes about 10 minutes to attach the electrodes and complete the test, but the actual recording takes only a few seconds.
Your EKG patterns will be kept on file for later comparison with future EKG recordings.
If you have questions, be sure to ask your doctor.
What Is a Holter Monitor?
In addition to the standard EKG, your doctor may recommend other specialized EKG tests, including a holter monitor or a signal-averaged electrocardiogram.
A holter monitor is a portable EKG that monitors the electrical activity of a person's heart, generally for one to two days, 24 hours a day. It is most often used when the doctor suspects an abnormal heart rhythm or ischemia (not enough blood flow to the heart muscle).
It is a painless test; electrodes from the monitor are taped to the skin. Once the monitor is in place, you can go home and perform all of your normal activities (except showering). You will be asked to keep a diary of your activities and any symptoms you experience and when they occur.
What Is an Event Monitor?
If your symptoms are infrequent your doctor may suggest an event monitor. This is a device that, when you push a button, will record and store the heart's electrical activity for a few minutes. Each time you develop symptoms you should try to get a reading on the monitor. Event monitors are typically used for one month. This information can later by transmitted by telephone to the doctor for interpretation.
What Is a Signal-Averaged Electrocardiogram?
This is a painless test used to assess whether a person is at high risk of developing a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia. It is performed in a similar manner to the EKG, but uses sophisticated technology to look for risk of heart arrhythmias.
Read more on: heart disease, guide